Love and the Living Impaired
by GeniaTheParadox
Summary: Warm Bodies AU. S doesn't remember his name or anything about his life before this incredibly tedious zombie apocalypse happened. But then he meets an interesting human called John, and forgotten things like heartbeats and holding hands suddenly have the potential to exhume the world. [I WILL FINISH THIS I SWEAR]
1. The Tedious End Of The World

So I watched Warm Bodies for the first time a few weeks ago and it kind of changed me, mostly because it's the first time I've watched anything with zombies in it that hasn't given me nightmares. Seriously, even Shaun of the Dead gave me sleepless nights, because a zombie apocalypse is my worse fear. But Warm Bodies didn't scare me at all. It's probably because of the point of view – zombies seem a lot less terrifying when the main protagonist _is _one, instead of just the plucky human running away from them.

My first thought once the movie was over (besides _oh my god this movie is so lovely and perfect and wow)_ was that Warm Bodies would make a great Johnlock AU. So fanfiction had to be written. Of course. I can link almost anything back to my otp.

Don't think that I'm spoiling you because I'm publishing three chapters at once though. It's literally just because today is the last time I'm going to be at a proper computer with working internet and everything (I may have an awesome new smart phone now, but I'm still pretty much internetless back at my house in the Dark Ages), so I'm trying to publish as much fanfiction as possible all in one go. I have no clue when I'm going to be able to update this, so please don't hate me. I _will _finish this fic, I am determined. It may take me a while, but I will not leave you all hanging forever.

So yeah. Reviews would be rather nice.

And I do not own Sherlock, nor do I own the concept of Warm Bodies. I am merely smushing them together for my own amusement.

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**Love and the Living Impaired**

**Chapter One – The Tedious End Of The World**

I'm a mess. Every now and again I catch a glimpse of my reflection, and it's a bit of a struggle to come to terms with the state I'm in. I'm so pale. I need to get out into the sun more. My posture is terrible. And I'm so thin and drawn. I need to start eating better. I really am a wreck.

I probably shouldn't be so hard on myself though. I mean, I _am _dead, after all. We all are. Everyone I pass as I shuffle slowly across this park is dead. That woman walking down the opposite footpath to me is dead. That teenager sitting on the bench is dead. That man with no legs crawling across the grass is definitely dead. In the grand scheme of things, I really shouldn't get so caught up in my appearance. It's not like anyone cares what I look like. They're all far too busy being dead to care about anything.

I should introduce myself. I'm... er... my name is... erm... I think it began with an S. I can't really remember. I don't know how old I was when I died, although going by the looks of me I'd say I was in my early thirties. I can't remember what I did for a living when I was alive, but going by my clothes – what must have been a sharp suit, a big black coat and a scarf around my neck – I must have been someone important, or someone with money. Or possibly an undertaker, although I only want that to be true because of the irony. I can't remember how I died, or how long I've been dead for, but I suppose that hardly matters now.

Don't ask how this whole apocalypse thing happened. Like everything else, I've forgotten it. I assume it was a viral infection of some kind. A group of scientists playing God, or maybe chemical warfare gone horribly wrong. Whatever the reason, this is the world now. And God, it's boring. It's just us corpses and the few living humans still left, kept well away from us on the other side of the river, relatively safe in their City behind the huge concrete wall.

I was currently shuffling my way to the place I called home. Most corpses around here don't bother finding a place of their own. When you don't need to sleep or shower, having a roof over your head becomes kind of pointless. But I like having my own space.

The street where I live, in this dilapidated city whose name I've forgotten, no longer has a street sign so I have no idea what it's actually called. But on the front door it says '221B'. The flat I stay in is rather cosy, and oddly familiar. Sometimes I wonder whether I actually used to live here, back when I was alive. If I did, then I must have been a very strange person. The kitchen looks more like a laboratory, full of cracked test tubes, a broken microscope and a Bunsen burner, but hardly any traces of it ever being used for cooking. There are lots of books, more than the bookcases can hold, which all seem to be about human anatomy, common law and natural poisons. I've attempted to read them, but it takes ages. My corpse brain takes a long time to put words together, so it can take hours just to read one page. But still, it's nice that I can still read. There's also a beautiful violin in my flat, but my fingers are too stiff and fumbling to actually play it. I have an impressive collection of vinyl records though, as well as a record player that I managed to figure out how to use a while ago and I find very comforting.

I'm almost certain that no other corpse bothers listening to old vinyl records of classical music in their spare time, let alone go out of their way to collect new ones. But I'm not a normal corpse. That should be obvious to you by now.

One good thing about 221B is that I have somewhere to keep out of the way when the Boneies are out. Terrible name, I know. It's like a five year old came up with it. But 'horrifying skeletal monsters' is difficult to say out loud when you're a corpse, far too many syllables. The Boneies are what all us living dead have to look forward to in our future. They're the corpses who are so far gone that the dead flesh has rotted off their bones, leaving them as eerie black skeletons. You wouldn't think to look at them that they used to be living, breathing human beings, with jobs and families and hopes and dreams. They're nothing more than monsters now. They leave us corpses alone thankfully, but they'll eat anything with a heartbeat. I mean, so will I. But at least I have the good decency to be conflicted about it.

When I'm not listening to music or attempting to read in 221B, I like to walk around the streets during the day for what I like to call 'corpse-watching'. I watch all the corpses who shuffle past me and try to figure out what they used to be when they were alive. I'm not sure why I find it so amusing, but it makes the days slightly less dull and I'm rather good at it. For example, that man was probably a security guard who spent most of his time sitting down. That woman probably worked in an office, something in the media going by the frankly alarming shade of pink all her clothes are. That kid in the hoodie was probably unemployed.

Sitting at a bus stop outside what used to be a hospital called St. Bartholomew's is a female corpse. Her hair is in a loose, tangled ponytail, and she's wearing tattered trousers, a torn blouse and a white lab coat covered in dirt and congealed blood stains. Going by her appearance and the fact that she spends every day sitting outside a hospital, I assume that she was a doctor of some kind when she was alive. This is M (that's all of her name that she can remember either), and she and I are best friends. By that I mean we regularly sit alone at this bus stop, groaning and staring awkwardly at each other. Sometimes our groans turn into almost conversations, and on special occasions we manage to get actual words out. Although the words did tend to be basically the same, and today was no exception.

"H-hungry..." M stammered, leaning close to me so I could hear her quiet voice.

It took me a while to reply, but eventually I groaned out the word, "...C-City..."

So we set off to hunt, soon joining a group of other corpses also making their way towards the bridge across the river. One thing all us corpses have in common is our taste in food, and it makes sense to hunt in packs. Almost all the surviving humans seemed to be the gun-happy military types that would shoot a corpse in the head as soon as look at them, so we on the other side of the river believe in safety in numbers.

Oh God, we all move so slowly. We don't really run unless we're being chased or when we're doing the chasing, so just getting from A to B can be unbearably frustrating. Who'd have thought the end of the world would turn out to be so tedious?

Ugh, we're walking _so slowly_, it'll be ages before we get to the City. You may as well skip to the next chapter. This may take a while.


	2. Finally, Something Interesting

**Chapter Two – Finally, Something Interesting **

The humans have all kept themselves separated from us across the river, behind the huge concrete wall they built, as safe as it's possible to be from all of us. But occasionally they have to leave the safety of what they have simply called the City, I'm guessing for supplies. That's when we get to eat.

I don't really miss real food. I suppose when I was alive I wasn't much of a food lover. To be honest, if I could I wouldn't eat at all. Not just because killing people and eating their flesh is extremely depressing, but because I just don't really want to. But sometimes the hunger is just too much to ignore.

Finally – after what felt like several years of excruciatingly slow walking – we all made it to the other side of the river. We followed the smell of living flesh, the indescribable scent that only something with a beating heart gave off, until we came to a building that used to be a pharmacy. The place seemed deserted at first sight, but I could hear voices coming from the back room. We all quietly shuffled towards the sound, and I could hear what was being said on the other side of the door.

"Find anything?" said a man's voice.

"A few things," said a slightly muffled female voice. "Headache tablets, antiseptic wipes, bandages..."

A second female voice said "Ooh, I found some Valium!"

"What would we need that for?" said the first woman's voice.

"I dunno," the second woman said with a chuckle. "Lord knows we could do with a bit of cheering up."

There was the sound of quiet laughter from what sounded like some other men, but the first woman spoke again, sounding stern and impatient.

"Stop messing around. We have our orders. Find as many _useful_ medical supplies as we can carry, shoot anything that moves and get the hell out of here."

The first man's voice scoffed. "God, Sarah, you sound just like Lestrade."

"Thank you," said the woman called Sarah.

"Yeah, that wasn't a compliment," said the man.

The second woman suddenly shushed them. "Do you guys hear something? I think something's moving outside..."

There was a murmur of other voices. There were definitely more than just three people inside. The other corpses were clearly hungrier than me and growing impatient at just listening at the door. Led by the largest of our group – a lumbering gorilla of a corpse who must have been a nightclub bouncer with a tendency towards violence when he was alive – we all burst into the room, teeth bared and fingers ready to claw at flesh, with me reluctantly bringing up the rear.

It was pandemonium. There were yells and gunshots, bodies falling as corpses were shot in the head and humans were overpowered, screaming in pain as they were eaten alive. M had a young man underneath her, breathing his last as she bit out chucks of his neck. It would probably repulse me if I was alive, but gruesome sights like that were all too common now. I was about to join M and the other corpses who has joined her to feast on the young man's lower intestines, when I was stopped in my tracks by something... _interesting_.

A man with closely cropped blonde hair and bright blue eyes, short but with clearly a very toned body under his jeans and jumper, had just shot a corpse right between the eyes with a handgun from the other side of the room... and he was _beautiful_. I could have sworn I actually felt my heart beat, just once, and I hadn't felt it beating in a very long time. I walked towards him instead, but was mildly distracted by someone shooting me in the shoulder.

It didn't hurt – nothing ever hurts anymore – but it was enough to piss me off. I looked up at who had shot me and found a woman with a brunette ponytail and a very intense glint in her eye, standing up on a counter and pointing a shotgun at me.

"Don't even think about it, you zombie scum!" she cried, and I realised it was the stern sounding woman I had heard through the door. She fired a shot at me again and missed – she was _rubbish _at this – and that got me really mad.

Now I'm not proud of what happened next. If I thought it would do any good, I'd ask you to skip the next paragraph so your opinion of me isn't tarnished by what you're about to read. But who am I kidding? You know what I am by now, you know what us corpses are capable of, and I'm sure you've already assumed what happened next. Okay, here goes.

This woman's amateurish attempts to kill me had made me so angry that I attacked. I grabbed her by the ankles, pulling her off the counter so fast that her head banged off it before she hit the floor. I took a huge bite out of her arm, making her scream and drop her gun, and I noticed as she did that she was wearing a really nice silver charm bracelet around her wrist. If I had just eaten her flesh and left her brain intact, she would have come back as a corpse like me. But, as I said before, I don't really like to eat. The only appeal that a living human body has to me is the brains.

I know, disgusting. Forgive me. But it's the best part. Not the taste or anything; I don't even know what brains taste like since my tastes buds don't seem to work anymore. It's not about how they taste, but what they do to me. You see, when a corpse eats a human's brains we see all their thoughts and memories, we feel all their emotions. It's the closest a corpse can get to dreaming, since we don't sleep. So I bashed this poor woman's head in and scooped out as much of her brain as I could (sorry for that mental image, I hope you're not trying to eat lunch right now), stashing most of it in my coat pockets before stuffing a handful of it in my mouth.

What I saw really surprised me. I was this woman, I was Sarah, sitting in the backseat of a car with none other than the beautiful blonde man who I'd just seen shoot that other corpse between the eyes. She felt so happy, so very in love with man in front of her – _John _– who had just given her a lovely silver charm bracelet and had told her how much he cared about her.

A yell brought me back in the room. The only living human left was the blonde haired man – John, his name was _John_. He was cowering in the corner of the room, fumbling with his handgun that had apparently run out of bullets, as that big gorilla of a corpse advanced on him, groaning menacingly. I don't know why, perhaps it was left over feelings from his girlfriend's brains that I just been eating, or maybe it was that single heartbeat I'm sure I felt the first time I looked at him, but I couldn't bear to see this man die. I had to protect him. I had to keep him safe. I picked up the heaviest thing I could find, which turned out to be a fire extinguisher, and cracked the gorilla of a corpse right across the head with all the strength I had. The blow was enough to crack his skull, killing him properly.

"J-John..." I groaned in what I hoped was a comforting way, as I looked down at the blonde man still cowering on the floor.

He looked up at me, his bright blue eyes full of mingled terror and confusion. He probably thought I'd killed that other corpse because I was so desperate to eat him myself. I wanted to explain to him that I meant him no harm, and that he didn't have to be afraid because I had no desire to hurt him. But as I knelt down to face him, the only word I managed to get out was "John..."

"Get away from me!" he said, his voice shaking as he continued to fumble with his unloaded gun.

This wasn't going so well. I could hear the surviving corpses getting up to leave, and I had to think fast. I dipped my fingertips into the horrible, black congealed blood currently oozing slowly out of the bullet hole in my shoulder, and smeared it onto the side of John's face. He understandably recoiled from my touch, still staring at me with a kind of confused fear, but my plan worked; he smelt a lot less human now.

I attempted to smile and managed to groan out a whispered "S-safe... now... c-come... with... m-me..."

"What?" he said incredulously.

I pressed my finger to my lips to show that he should be quiet, before offering my hand to him.

"C-come... with... me... k-keep... you... s-safe..."

He narrowed his eyes at me, like he couldn't believe what he was seeing, and whispered "What are you?"

I wasn't sure how to answer that, but eventually he let me help him to his feet. I could have sworn I felt my heart beat once again as I held onto his arm.

Oh God, why was I doing this? There was no way this could not all go horribly wrong. Why did I need to keep this particular human safe, why did I need him with me? It's not like there was anything particularly special about this human... other than the fact that he was beautiful. Ugh, what is _wrong _with me?

John seemed too scared to do anything other than let me lead him out of the room, right behind the remainder of the corpses. I glanced down as we left, and spotted a girl with John's blonde hair and bright blue eyes, crouching under a table and looking even more baffled and terrified than he did as she watched me leading John away.

Seriously, why was I doing this? Collecting interesting knick-knacks and vinyl records to keep in 221B was one thing, but now I was collecting a human. Why couldn't I just be normal?


	3. For God's Sake, Stop Staring At Him

**Chapter Three – For God's Sake, Stop Staring At Him**

John didn't say a word as we made our very slow way back across the river, I can only assume because he was too afraid to speak. In retrospect, I have no idea how I managed to get him all the way back to 221B without any other corpses noticing that he was a living, breathing, edible human. Maybe it was because he wasn't drawing attention to himself by running scared or trying to shoot anyone. I was just relieved that we didn't stumble across any Boneies – I'm sure they'd notice immediately that John wasn't just another corpse.

The street was completely deserted as I led John into 221B and up the stairs to my flat. I wish I could have tidied up a bit, but how was I to know I was going to have company today? I've never had company, let alone living company.

John finally spoke, his voice shaking as he glared defiantly. "Look, if you're going to kill me, just get it over and done with."

I wasn't sure how he could still think that I was going to eat him. "S-safe... now... n-not... going... t-to... hurt... you," I pointed to the dusty threadbare armchair that was opposite the leather one I favoured. "P-please... sit..."

John looked suspiciously at me before very cautiously sitting down. He didn't take his eyes off me, like he was convinced that I would attack him at any moment if he let his guard down. He was shivering slightly, so I guess it must be cold in my flat. I hadn't noticed. I shuffled off towards the kitchen and made my way to the bedroom, pulling the musty blanket off the bed.

When I got back into the living room John was still sitting rigidly in his seat, looking nervously around the room. He edged away when I came near him, looking horrified again, but that horror turned once again into confusion as I draped the blanket over him.

"What are you?" he whispered again.

I still couldn't think of a way to answer that question, so I sat down opposite him in my leather armchair. I watched his bright blue eyes travel once more around the room, lingering on the peeling patterned wallpaper with the smiley face drawn on it with spray paint and bullet holes, on the overflowing bookshelves, and on the tottering stack of vinyl records next to my record player.

But I only had eyes for him. John really was beautiful, handsome in a very unassuming way, like he probably didn't even realise just how gorgeous he was. I didn't even know that I could still find people attractive, being dead and all. And I wouldn't have guessed that I'd find men attractive. But then I had a sudden, alarming thought; what if John wasn't attracted to men? I'd just seen after eating Sarah's brains that he'd being in a relationship with a woman. So I had no chance. Not that I would anyway, since I was a disgusting, brain-eating corpse that no human in their right mind would want. Seriously, why had I brought him here? And why couldn't I just stop staring at him? I probably looked so creepy.

As if he could hear my train of thought, John nervously said "Why did you bring me here?"

Good question. "K-keep... you... s-safe," I eventually replied.

"But I _was_ safe," he said, glaring at me. "I was safe in the City, and you've brought me here, to the other side of the river which is teaming with corpses. You didn't really think this through, did you?"

He made a very good point, but before I could get out the words to tell him so, he suddenly looking a little bit remorseful.

"I'm sorry," he said. "That was unfair, I mean I'm sure you felt like you were doing the right thing, saving me from that other zombie, bringing me here to your little hiding place. But I don't understand why you would even do this. Why me?"

Yet another very good question that I had no answer to, so I just shrugged. He covered himself a little bit more with the musty duvet, smiling rather sadly, and I felt my heart beat for the third time today. Spooky.

"You're a strange one, aren't you?" he said, raising an eyebrow at me. "Do you have a name?"

"S..." I tried to say. "Sss... Shh..."

"Did it begin with an S?" he asked before I hurt myself trying to remember.

I nodded.

"Then I'll just call you S," he said with another sad smile. "I'm John. John Watson."

John Watson. There was no way I was going to forget that name, even if I'd forgotten my own. I tried to smile in response, but it may have looked more like a grimace.

"So how long do you plan on keeping me here?" he asked. "I mean, I'm going to have to go back to the City eventually, or they're all going to think I'm dead."

I really didn't like the idea of him leaving. Now that I had John Watson in my so-called life, I really didn't want to let him go. It sounded terribly selfish, I know. But I was rather fond of this human. I shook my head at him.

"You're not letting me leave?" he said incredulously.

"N-not... safe..." I stammered. "Have... t-to... st-stay... keep... y-you... safe..."

"Yeah, I get it," he said impatiently. "You want to keep me safe. And that's nice and everything, but I can't stay here forever."

Eventually I said "A... f-few... days..."

"A few days," he repeated. "And then you'll let me go back?"

I nodded, even though I'd rather he didn't leave at all. He still looked apprehensive, but ever so slightly less annoyed at me. He sat back on the threadbare armchair, holding the duvet close to him.

"I'm going to need food, you know," he said. "If I have to stay here for a few days."

"Not... n-now..." I mumbled. "Not... s-safe... outside... t-tomorrow..."

"Fine," he said with a bit of a frown. "Just promise me you won't try to eat my brains while I sleep, okay?"

I almost laughed, which was strange as I couldn't remember ever laughing before, at least not as a corpse. It came out sounding more like a kind of weird cough.

"P-promise," I stuttered. "Won't... ever... h-hurt you..."

Maybe this wouldn't be so bad, I thought as I watched John eventually fall asleep on the armchair. He didn't seem quite as afraid of me as he probably should have been, but that bravery just made him even more beautiful in my eyes. I really needed to stop staring at him though. What if he woke up suddenly and found me, a hideous corpse, staring unblinkingly at him. That would be unnerving for anyone. I should stop.

Oh, but he's just so beautiful... I'll stop staring when he stops being so beautiful. Don't look at me like that. You would be just as hopelessly infatuated with him if you were in my position, perhaps even more so. After all, you're only human.

* * *

Hope you're enjoying so far, Humble Readers.

As I mentioned back before chapter one, I have no clue when I'm going to get the chance to update this fic. But it _will_ be done at some point. It's not a case of me not writing it fast enough, but the unfortunate fact that now I've finished my course at college I can no longer use the library's internet for free every week and I have no money to go to the internet cafe to publish stuff. I know, right. My life is such a shambles.

But I'll try my best. I love you all way too much to leave you hanging.

xxx


	4. Playing House With a Human

**Chapter Four – Playing House With a Human**

Even though I kept telling myself not to stare, I didn't take my eyes off John for the entire night. I think a part of me was afraid that if I looked away he'd suddenly make a break for it. A stupid thing to be scared of, obviously. I'd only known this seemingly unremarkable human for a day and already I couldn't bear the thought of him leaving, however completely understandable his desire to leave was. After all, I was essentially just some strange corpse keeping him in a rundown flat on the wrong side of the river against his will for no good reason. Attempting to escape would be a perfectly sane thing for John to do. But, all the same, I couldn't bear it.

Daylight shone weakly through the dirty windows of 221B, and John stirred where he lay, curled up awkwardly on the threadbare armchair with the musty old duvet wrapped around him. He yawned, rubbed his eyes and then almost fell off the armchair in surprise when he saw me.

"Have you been watching me sleep all night?" he said, sounding croaky.

There was no point in arguing, so I just nodded. His shook his head at me.

"That's really creepy, you know?" he said, wincing as he stretched. "Why didn't you just go to sleep too?"

I narrowed my eyes at him as if it was completely obvious, which of course it was. "I... don't... sleep..."

"Right," he said, rubbing his left shoulder uncomfortably. "So you decided to just creepily watch me instead? How nice... and not at all unsettling. Does this flat of yours have a bathroom?"

I nodded, pointing towards the stairs which led up to the bathroom and second bedroom. I didn't go up there very often, so it was probably in an even worse state than the rest of the flat was. John got to his feet, groaning as he stretched and drawing my eyes irresistibly to his arms and his broad chest. Honestly, I have got to stop staring at him.

Once John had gone upstairs I got to my feet and looked out of the window. The streets were deserted but I knew it was only a matter of time until the corpses came out to shuffle around aimlessly for another tedious day. The putrid mush that was Sarah's brain was still in my pocket, and it was my best chance to learn more about John's life without actually having to ask. So, after checking over my shoulder to make sure John wasn't coming back down the stairs, I stuffed another handful of grey matter into my mouth.

Suddenly I was in some kind of playing area, the grass greener than I'd ever seen it, bright sunlight warming my skin. Sarah was only a child, and she was being pushed on the swings by someone who could only be her father, the two of them laughing happily.

Then the image changed. Sarah was older, but still only in her teens, and hiding from a group of corpses. With a horrible pang of recognition I saw that one of the corpses was Sarah's father, his eyes blank, his skin waxy, blood covering his mouth. The corpses merely stood there, staring and groaning at each other. Sarah wanted to reach out to her father, but another man held her back. The man – who was called Greg Lestrade – had greying hair and a steely glint of remorseless determination in his eye. He scolded Sarah for daring to look at the corpses as anything more than the vicious, diseased monsters they were. It didn't matter who they were when they were human, he said. They were flesh-eating zombies now, nothing more or less. And, to prove his point, he loaded his shotgun and fired into the group of corpses, hitting a small female one in the back of the head. The corpses turned, ready to attack, ready to defend themselves, the corpse of Sarah's father leading the charge. Lestrade forced the shotgun into Sarah's trembling hands and, with a feeling of overwhelming heartbreak, she blew her father's brains out.

The scene changed quickly. Sarah was slightly older, maybe in her early twenties, standing in an orderly row with others her own age. A younger John was standing beside her, handsome and broad shouldered, but frowning and rolling his eyes as Greg Lestrade paced in front of the group, explaining how it was their duty as some of the last remaining humans in the country to do all they could to protect mankind and rid the world of this zombie scourge. The young John looked as if he really didn't want to be there, but Sarah was filled with a vast sense of purpose as she took in to every word Lestrade said.

Just as soon as it started I was back in the room, looking out of the filthy window of my flat at the deserted street below. As I suspected, John had been taught to be mistrustful of corpses like me. He had been taught to hate us, to see us as monsters who deserved no pity or understanding, nothing but a bullet in the head. But, as I went over the memories I'd seen, it was _Sarah_ who had believed it blindly and without question. John didn't seem to want to be there. John didn't seem quite as easily brainwashed. There was hope for him yet.

I turned slowly at the sound of John coming back down the stairs, irresistibly noticing that he had aged extremely well from the young man I had seen in my head. I really had to stop staring at him.

"That bathroom is disgusting," he muttered with a frown. "But I suppose you have no use for it. So have you figured out where I'm going to get any food? Since you're so insistent on keeping me here."

I hadn't even been thinking about it, but the answer came to me surprisingly quickly. The old sandwich shop downstairs had a store cupboard full of tinned food and bottles of water. Perfect.

"St-stay... here..." I stammered eventually. "I'll... b-be right... back..."

"You're leaving me alone?" he said, looking indignant at the idea. "Why can't I go with you?"

I shook my head. All this talking was exhausting. "Not... safe... st-stay... here... pl-please..."

John sighed and rolled his eyes, dumping himself down on the armchair he'd slept on and causing a cloud of dust to burst out of it. "Fine, but don't be long. I'm starving."

I nodded and shuffled out of the flat, making my way down the stairs as quickly as my annoyingly stiff legs would allow. The only remaining way into the sandwich shop was in through the broken glass of the front door, which was why I couldn't bring John along with me. It would be difficult to hide him from all the corpses that were already beginning to shuffle up and down the street.

I had hardly made it into the back room of the shop when I knew that I had made a mistake leaving John alone. He was going to try and escape, I just knew it, but there was no way he'd make it passed the front door with all the corpses outside. Don't ask how I knew all this – if anything, it was just a hunch – but I made it back outside in time to grab John and pull him behind a phone box.

"T-told... you..." I muttered, frowning at him. "Not... s-safe..."

"Right, yeah, I'm sorry," he said quickly, his eyes lingering on the corpses shuffling slowly up and down the street, far too close to where we were.

The easiest way back inside the shop and then back up to the flat was to not draw any attention to ourselves. I dipped my fingers into the congealed blood from yesterday's bullet wound and smeared it across his cheek again, making him recoil in disgust, but at least it made the smell of his living, beating heart a bit less obvious.

"Be... dead..."

He looked confused for a second, until I gave him a meaningful look and held my arms out stiffly in front of me.

"Oh, right! Okay."

We left our hiding place and slowly walked back towards the shop, John doing a ridiculously cartoonish impression of a corpse. "Too... much..."

He toned it down a bit and we managed to get inside the sandwich shop without any other corpses noticing us. Once we got to the back room John immediately began rooting through every cupboard, grinning broadly – _beautifully_ – every time he found any food that hadn't gone stale and unopened bottles of drinking water.

"I wasn't trying to escape, you know," he said once we were back in 221B with all the food and water both of us could carry.

I looked at him in surprise as he cleared a space on the kitchen table to put all the food and then began searching the draws for a can opener.

"I was trying to help," he continued. "I didn't know how long you'd be or how far away you were going. If I knew you were just going downstairs, I would have stayed put. But I was starving and, no offence, but you don't move very quickly so I figured I could find something to eat a lot quicker."

He finally found a can opener, and turned to me with a smile that made my heart beat. "What I'm trying to say is I'm sorry. I didn't mean to worry you."

I really didn't know what to say to that, so I just nodded. But a sort of explosion was happening inside me, like happiness or something very similar to it. He didn't want to leave me. He didn't want to escape. It was amazing that only yesterday he was convinced I was going to kill him, but now it was as if he finally understood that I had no intention of hurting him. I didn't have to worry. I could see it in his eyes – in his beautiful blue eyes – that he wasn't going anywhere, at least not yet.

For the rest of the day we stayed in 221B. I watched him smile as he made himself a mug of tea with the teabags and powdered milk we found in the shop, watched as he looked through all the old books in the flat and admired the violin that I couldn't play. We listened to my records, and he didn't look quite so alarmed when he caught me staring at him. He asked me questions about myself, but quickly realised that there was virtually nothing about myself that I could remember, so instead he told me about his life on the other side of the river.

"It's kind of nice here actually," he said, sitting in the threadbare armchair opposite me as a Mozart symphony played in the background. "Back in the City it's always so stressful. We're living in a constant state of fear, but that's encouraged. Fear is what protects us. Fear is what keeps us alert. I don't remember the last time I could just sit and relax. It's just me and my sister, Harry, back in the City. We don't really get on so well, but we look out for each other. I hope she's okay. She's probably worried sick."

I looked away from him then. Guilt, that's what this feeling was called. There was no way that I could keep him here forever, not if he had family to go back to. Why did I have to be so selfish?

"It's weird, isn't it?" he said, making me looked back at him again. "Back in the City those in charge tell us not to think of you corpses as people. You're all just monsters, mindless zombies. But you were all people once. I mean, you had a name. You must have had family and friends and job and... a _life._ We act like we're the ones who had everything taken away from us, but at least we can remember who we are, at least we can remember what life was like before all this happened, at least we're not alone. I don't blame you for wanting to make a friend, for wanting to keep hold of a bit of humanity. And I must say, you've done a pretty good job of it. It sounds weird, but this hiding play of yours is sort of comforting, you know. It's like... a home."

Yet another heartbeat pounded singularly in my chest, and I tried my best to smile at him. Okay, maybe this wouldn't be so terrible. This could just possibly be the best and worst decision I had ever made. I'd probably regret this once it was over, but who's to say I couldn't enjoy it in the meantime? There was so little in my tedious half-life that made me feel anything even close to happiness. Yet I had _felt_ more in one day with John than I had ever done since I technically died. It was foolish of me to do this, but I would be an even bigger fool not to savour every single second.

Look at me, coming over all sentimental.

* * *

Once again I have no clue when I'm going to be able to update this. A combination of a lack of internet and severe case of writer's block. But I shan't leave you hanging, Humble Readers. This fic will be finished at some point, I promise. It may take a while, but it will be done.

xxx


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